How Google is Stepping up to the Plate: Three Memorable Announcements from Google Next 2017

This year’s Google Next Conference in San Francisco was a huge event, both from a participant point of view, with over 10,000 attendees, and from the many ground-breaking announcements that have secured Google as a formidable contender among the top cloud providers.

All of the announcements are very relevant to the cloud market, and I’m going to handpick three to highlight:

Google Compute Engine prices have been cut by up to 8% depending on region; customers in the United States will see a 5% drop in costs, customers in Europe a 4.9% drop, and customers in Tokyo seeing a 8% drop.

Google announced that their free tier which is only available in the United States, will be extended from its previous duration of 60 days to a full 12 months, with a $300 credit across all GCP services and APIs. The free tier, which now offers enough power to run a small app in Google’s cloud, includes 15 different services in addition to the extended program.

This move shows Google stepping up its game against AWS, which has been offering a similar, but more limited free tier and free 12 month trial for its users. Google is now incentivizing prospective customers to try out Google cloud services and possibly migrate from other cloud providers. (In the past, AWS’s free 12 month trial encouraged many new developers to learn about the public cloud ).

Google announced their new “Committed Use Discounts”, which provide a significant discount off Google’s list price (57%) for cloud storage in return for a one or three year commitment.

This new offering, which is reminiscent of AWS’s Reserved Instances, offers users much more: the flexibility to use different instance and machine types and to change them, and without any upfront costs.

AWS has responded to Google’s announcement that their “Convertible Reserved Instances” are available which are more flexible than their regular Reserved Instances, allow using different instance families, operating systems, or tenancies over the Reserved Instance term, and offer a significant discount of up to 45% compared to On-Demand prices. These Convertible Reserved Instances can be purchased for a three-year term, but are not available for a one year commitment.

These new offerings from Google and AWS highlight the dynamic and competitive state of the cloud market. While Amazon is the most advanced provider at this time, it will be fascinating to watch Google attempts to change the rules that Amazon and Microsoft have established.

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